Like anywhere in world, we are mixed.
There are people who do their job honestly and without need of scamming people.
And then we have those who do bullsh1t.
There will always be this 2 types of people, where-ever you go.
But I can say few things.
We have like, good collages, they are super hard to get diploma on.
We have like, high unemployment rate, like right behind Spain.
So people, either like, go outside to world, or stay and open home work.
We have those who work honestly without cr4p, and those who do sh1t.
And in terms of like music gear, we don't have like , 5 guns in house live avarage family in USA. xD
Only police here have guns. xD
So when we need something, we like, find people who have it in local 2nd hand market place.
And they like, gave us time to show stuff.
Tons of times I was in situation what I was interested in some stuff, and I didn't want to buy them on blind.
And there were tons of people with messages like; " My friend has XXX part of music gear, I can message him and tell him to show that piece of gear to you. ".
I was tons of time in situation like that, were people from local music community did let me in their house, and show me pedals / amps / guitars .....
In my country, cases where someone would take a gun, and like kill half of country is extremely rare. 1 case in like 100 years so ....
Lastly I did wanted to try one guitar model, and one pickup, few of very kind people did show me that piece of gear.
Same goes for like this pickups replicas .... If I wanted, I could try all of them in next 15 minutes. XD (Okey, not in 15 min, but in next few days - but you get the point).
The problem with that replica stuff is simple.
Like anywhere else, some of them are good, some of them are bad.
But they have no name. And if you want to sell them, you need to put them in like 1/10th of price, and you still won't sell them.
Some of custom made guitars are like on market for like 2 years straight .....